Civic scientific literacy should be conceptualized as involving three related dimensions: a vocabulary of basic scientific constructs sufficient to read competing views in a newspaper or magazine, an understanding of the process or nature of scientific inquiry, and some level of understanding of the impact of science and technology on individuals and on society.

Miller, J. (1998) "The measurement of civic scientific literacy"

The alternative is to think of literacy broadly – and scientific literacy specifically – as being the possession of a core set of intellectual constructs that provide the means to read, parse, and make some sense of a wider array of new information.

Miller, J. (2014) "The importance of Civic Scientific Literacy in a Just-in-time World"

Almost 20 years separate a quote from another and, in that time, many others definitions of "scientific literacy" have been proposed. Also a huge set of items have been developed to measure what kind of things makes a person scientifically literate. But, what does it mean to be scientifically literate? What is scientific culture? Are scientific literacy and scientific culture referring to different things? How much scientific culture is enough? They are all open questions. These and other issues will be discussed and analyzed by several research groups from different approaches but with a common concern about scientific culture and its measures.